By KARL ROVE Last July, President Obama's campaign announced that it had raised an average of $29 million in each of the previous three months for itself and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). I was only mildly impressed. After all, that was well below the $50 million a month needed to reach the campaign's goal of a $1 billion war chest for the 2012 race.

Seven months later, I'm even less impressed. Through January, the president has raised an average of $24 million a month for his campaign and the DNC. Next week, the Obama campaign will release its February numbers, but the president is on track to be hundreds of millions of dollars shy of his original goal.

It's not for lack of trying. Mr. Obama has already attended 103 fund-raisers, roughly one every three days since he kicked off his campaign last April (twice his predecessor's pace).

The president faces other fund-raising challenges. For one, there are only so many times any candidate can go to New York or Hollywood or San Francisco for a $1 million fund-raiser. Team Obama is running through its easy money venues quickly.

CONT.

I guess the "Sasha and Malia" standard falls to the wayside due to the need for Bill Maher's cash.

"It's not as trendy as it was to be involved in the Obama campaign" - Barack Obama, March 2012

You don't say!

'Landslide' 2008 was a 7 point win running an error-free blank slate against and aging and confused challenger hated by his own party. The only demographic group in the country where Obama's approval has not dropped 7 points in popularity is right-ring Republicans.

I quit touting my prediction made at the height of his approval that Barack Obama will not be the nominee of his own party because the only substitute they can think of is to have Hillary run on the exact same record, policies and rhetoric.

"Where is the Dem party brain trust?" "You mean Marx, Alinsky and Soros?"

No, I mean the ones who should be chasing those demons out of their party. Where is the 'rising tide raises all boats', 'peace through strength', 'it is what you can do for your country' message today on their side of the aisle?

The only economic growth argument they have going, I just posted on the tax and political economic threads, is a combination of more debt, higher disincentives to produce and more assignment of blame, as if there is still room to improve on what already has been exhausted. Algae and tire pressure checks for a better tomorrow.

After this election I would assume that some real leadership will have to emerge from the dormant, pragmatic and centrist wing of that party. A lot of those people will have time on their hands...

"Where is the Dem party brain trust?" "You mean Marx, Alinsky and Soros?"

No, I mean the ones who should be chasing those demons out of their party. Where is the 'rising tide raises all boats', 'peace through strength', 'it is what you can do for your country' message today on their side of the aisle?

The only economic growth argument they have going, I just posted on the tax and political economic threads, is a combination of more debt, higher disincentives to produce and more assignment of blame, as if there is still room to improve on what already has been exhausted. Algae and tire pressure checks for a better tomorrow.

After this election I would assume that some real leadership will have to emerge from the dormant, pragmatic and centrist wing of that party. A lot of those people will have time on their hands...

They have been purged from positions of power, if not from the party totally by the marxists.

"Santorum sees opportunity in the Southern and Western areas of this blue state, the regions far from the urban and suburban enclaves of Chicagoland. He has forfeited 10 delegates up front by failing to get his allies onto some ballots, and polls show him 4 to 15 percentage points behind Romney, but even a loss could help Santorum. If he outdraws Romney among fervent conservatives and rural voters, it will give him more fodder for his argument that Romney is out of touch with the base of his party and the heartland of the country.

The former Pennsylvania senator constantly berates President Obama for trying to divide the country. But he seems to have no problem setting up an us-versus-them proposition within his own party."

My affections for the good Newt are a matter of record around here, and on a visceral level I can understand his frustrations at this moment, but it looks to me like the simple fact is he had a winning hand, blew it, and can't admit it.

All this is more than a little frustraing to me. Where's the well organized coherent statements of Romney or Saintorum like the following from Newt about Baraq and his energy lies and incoherence?

====================

President Obama’s Top Five Energy WhoppersMarch 19, 2012 With both President Obama and his chief strategist David Axelrod attacking Newt’s $2.50 gas plan this weekend, it is worthwhile to take a look at who is really trying to sell the American people “snake oil.”

President Obama has been traveling the country making demonstrably false excuses for his failures on energy policy. To borrow a line from White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, “I won’t attribute motivations…I’ll just say that anybody who says these things doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

“WE’RE DRILLING ALL OVER”FALSE:

“Do not tell me that we’re not drilling. We’re drilling all over this country. I guess there are a few spots where we’re not drilling. We’re not drilling in the National Mall. We’re not drilling at your house. I guess we could try to have, like, 200 oil rigs in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay.” (March 15, 2012, Prince George’s Community College.)

TRUE:

President Obama has blocked drilling in offshore areas totaling more than 10 times the size of Texas. He has stalled progress on an estimated one trillion barrels of oil in the American West, where the federal government owns the majority of the world’s oil shale. These off-limits supplies alone give the United States some of the largest oil reserves in the world. And no one proposes drilling in the Chesapeake Bay.

“WE’RE USING 20%, WE HAVE 2%”FALSE:

“America uses more than 20 percent of the world’s oil. If we drilled every square inch of this country — so we went to your house and we went to the National Mall and we put up those rigs everywhere — we’d still have only 2 percent of the world’s known oil reserves. Let’s say we miss something — maybe it’s 3 percent instead of 2. We’re using 20; we have 2.” (March 15, 2012, Prince George’s Community College.)

TRUE:

The President derives his “2 percent” from America’s “proven reserves,” about 20 billion barrels of oil. Proven reserves are the “quantity of energy sources estimated with reasonable certainty, from the analysis of geologic and engineering data, to be recoverable from well-established or known reservoirs with the existing equipment and under the existing operating conditions.”

The U.S. was said to have 30 billion barrels of “proven reserves” in 1980. Yet from 1980 to 2008, we produced about 75 billion barrels of oil.

No one thinks the proven reserves numbers come anywhere close to capturing our oil resources–even the U.S. government. The Energy Department estimated in 2006 that there were about 400 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil, including undiscovered resources and that does not even include oil shale. That’s 5 times the number President Obama is using. And oil shale is another 800 billion to 1 trillion barrels.

Total estimated resources exceed 1.4 trillion barrels of oil in the United States, and Goldman Sachs predicted last year that the U.S. has the potential to be the world’s largest oil-producing country by 2017. The number the President is using, about 20 billion barrels, is less than the current best estimate for the Bakken formation in North Dakota alone.

In addition, the President’s claim that “we use 20% of the world’s oil” is false and evasive. We consume 20% of the world’s oil production, not 20% of the world’s oil reserves as the President’s comparison suggests. The President is just cherry-picking numbers. The 2 and the 20 are not meaningfully related so the comparison makes no sense—it certainly doesn’t prove we’re consuming too much or that there is too little to go around.

OIL IS SOLD ON THE “WORLD MARKET”…THEREFORE PRESIDENT OBAMA’S POLICIES CAN’T INFLUENCE THE PRICE OF OILFALSE:

“How much oil we produce here at home, because we only have 2 percent and we use 20, that’s not going to set the price of gas worldwide, or here in the United States. Oil is bought and sold on the world market.” (March 7, 2012, North Carolina)

HE EMPHASIZES THIS AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN:

We can’t just allow ourselves to be held hostage to the ups and downs of the world oil market. (February 23, 2012, Miami, FL)

“Gas prices and the world oil markets right now are putting a lot of pressure on families right now.” (March 15, 2012, Prince George’s Community College.)

“When prices spike on the world market, it’s like a tax, it’s like somebody is going into your pocket.” (March 15, 2012, Prince George’s Community College.)

TRUE:

President Obama and his allies have repeatedly suggested his policies can’t be blamed for high gasoline prices because oil is “bought and sold on the world market” over which he has no control. But prices on the “world market” are determined primarily by supply and demand, and the President is blocking development of substantial oil supplies offshore and in the American West, which together are several times the known reserves of Saudi Arabia. No one has claimed the President can “set” the price of oil, but his choice to close these areas affect the price significantly.

He could reverse his policies on these federal lands with the stroke of a pen. There is nothing special about the “world market” that would prevent that large increase in supply from putting downward pressure on price.

The President’s own actions have betrayed the knowledge that even marginal production changes have a significant effect on oil prices. When his administration asked Saudi Arabia to increase its own oil production, its goal was to lower prices in the U.S., and when he tapped the Strategic Reserve during the Arab Spring in 2011, he did so for the same reason. His claims to be powerless in the “world market” are just a bad excuse for the results of his anti—American-energy policies.

“TAXPAYER GIVEAWAYS” TO OIL COMPANIESFALSE:

“What’s more, at a time when big oil companies are making more money than ever before, we’re still giving them $4 billion of your tax dollars in subsidies every year.” (President’s Weekly Address, March 17, 2012)

The oil industry is not subsidized. It is subject to generic tax deductions that apply to all U.S. manufacturers. What the President proposes is specifically targeting oil companies for tax increases, not ending subsides that are given specifically to the oil industry.

Under this view, the “giveaway” is that we are not taxing oil companies for the same things we do not tax anyone else. But not taxing an activity isn’t a “subsidy” or a “taxpayer giveaway”—unless you consider the income you’re allowed to keep a “subsidy,” too.

In addition, the President wants to end rules that prevent American companies from being double-taxed on energy they produce outside the United States, which would only benefit foreign competitors at the expense of American businesses.

The industry that is highly subsidized and receives “corporate welfare” under the Obama administration is the “green” energy industry—companies like Solyndra. The vast majority of energy sector tax preferences have been for renewables or energy efficiency companies. As the Congressional Budget Office recently reported, “Between 2009 and 2012, DOE provided an estimated $4.0 billion in subsidies for about $25 billion in loans.”

If the President is genuinely concerned about high gas prices, raising taxes on oil producers will cause gasoline prices to increase and will hurt consumers—whether he thinks that’s “fair” or not.

“SOLAR AND WIND” ARE SOLUTIONS TO HIGH GAS PRICESFALSE:

If we’re going to take control of our energy future and can start avoiding these annual gas price spikes that happen every year … if we’re going to avoid being at the mercy of these world events, we’ve got to have a sustained, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy. Yes, oil and gas, but also wind and solar and nuclear and biofuels, and more. (February 23, 2012, Miami, FL)

TRUE:

If 100% of American electricity today were generated by solar and wind technologies such as the President is pushing, it would have virtually no effect on the price of gasoline. Wind and solar are methods of generating electricity which we use to power our buildings. Gasoline is the fuel for our cars. We barely use oil at all to generate electricity, meaning that converting everything to wind and solar would do nothing to decrease the consumption of oil. The only circumstance under which the technologies President Obama mentions would be an answer to high gasoline prices is if wind and solar were economically competitive sources of electricity and we drove inexpensive electric cars with capacities comparable to conventional automobiles. But today that is a distant fantasy, not a solution.

"All this is more than a little frustraing to me. Where's the well organized coherent statements of Romney or Saintorum"

Indeed. Romney will have to make these distinctions himself - over and over - and not let the dishonest leader in chief continue to get away with such distortions of the truth. The MSM certainly will not call out OBama. This AM CNN is showing one of the anchors making smirks and faces when speaking of Senator Brown of Mass calling for an additional opening of the immigrant gates for thousands of Irish. She was clear that this is no doubt *political* pandering and will open flood gates from every other ethnic group.

She is exactly right. The problem is CNN rarely calls out the Brockman the same way like they do Republicans.

So it is for Romney to articulate the lies falsehoods, distortions of Obama and team.

It is still early but one has to ask who is running Romney's team. This stuff is not rocket science. Why can't the ahndlers come out with scripts for the manager to study. He can memorize.

"I yield to nobody in my conviction that Barack Obama's presidency has been a disaster for the Republic. Last week, in this space, I even suggested that some of his offenses rose to the level of impeachable "high crimes and misdemeanors."

Yet, try as I might, I can't convince myself that the 2012 election is a "hinge of history," and it's "game over" for liberty unless he's defeated. If Obama wins, the fight goes on; if he loses, don't pop the champagne corks just yet.

Consider that, since FDR, few second-term presidents have been capable of great mischief. Obama may have done most of the real damage he's capable of already."

Looks like about a 12 point win, Romney 47, Santorum 35%, off of a 7 to 1 money advantage with low turnout. Oh well.

As painful as the process has been, Romney is in a very nice position coming into the general election. With 4 different candidates still running, no one on the right can say they didn't have choices. With the outcome now mostly known, the battle remaining doesn't have to be so mean. The most moderate choice is winning, so independents who fear and distrust the far right can breathe a sigh of relief and have a voice on the ballot. Yet the guy is still pro-life, pro-defense, pro-energy, for spending and regulatory restraint, anti-Obamacare, and committed to cutting tax rates by 20%. As the late Wm F Buckley would say, pick the most conservative candidate who can win.

If he holds himself up as competent, ready and instills confidence, he could win and bring with him a slightly Republican House and Senate too.

Turning this country around has never been easier.

Regarding turnout, the excitement is about the choice in Nov, not about picking between the choices now.

If I were Romney right now, I would tell each remaining competitor privately that I don't care how long they stay in the race, that is their business, and that in each case, Santorum, Gingrich and Paul, that I stand to learn something from each of them and that I want a line of input open to them in the difficult process of governing.

Having mentally filed her as "progressive harpy", I don't spend any time watching RM, but apart from getting some of her facts wrong in BD's post, that was one helluva rant , , , and we can count on Team Baraq and his running dogs of the pravdas on picking up on the meme and feeding it with ample data.

MR is NOT a strong candidate. If he is the candidate, Baraq gets a free pass on Obamacare. If Santorum is the candidate, he can kick Obama's ass on this subject. (OTOH I think MR might do better on the economy, but RS connects well with blue collar while MR knows the guys who OWN the NASCARS)

I've been liking Santorum more and more (not digging his detour into the evils of pornography) and so was quite disappointed the other day when he apparently said that there was no difference between MR and Baraq. It seemed like he had allowed personal bitterness and self-importance get the better of him just as my man Newt had.

Then I saw his audio interview today on Neil Cavuto. His defense was strong and able.

"Having mentally filed her as "progressive harpy", I don't spend any time watching RM, but apart from getting some of her facts wrong in BD's post, that was one helluva rant"

Yes. Like following and responding to Krugman, she is relevant. That is as close to a story line on Mitt Romney that they will get. Note that the question of whether or not he is a better or worse liar than the President and the administration is a side-step from who has a better vision for the future. What scares them most is that it is now Mitt Romney with his various moving positions on the issues who offers the blank slate for the voter to paint on. Case in point: I am to the right of Romney, Santorum, Gingrich, and Dick Cheney too for that matter, but stand ready to cast my Presidential vote for Mitt Romney and take my chances.

Key 'lies outlined by Maddow:

'Lie' #1: [Obama inherited a recession and] ..."he made it worse". It took her to 7:18 on the tape to get to a point, any point, and that was her lead.

She points to the less than breakeven 'growth' in the economy to 'prove' him a liar. The unemployment rate went down while the workforce participation rate collapsed. In my estimation he made it worse by adding additional long-term, structural problems on top of the problems we already had and corrected none of the underlying faults. He took emergency spending levels and made them permanent. He took impending tax rate increases and made them impending again in 2 years. He took a housing correction and did everything he could to keep it from correcting. He took the automobile industry and put the rule of law and rules of limited government on its ear. He did everything he could to make energy unaffordable, then points to increased private production at the higher prices he caused as his doing. He took away my health plan when he said that no one would lose their current health plan. He put people into EPA that can regulate what we exhale and he put two people on the supreme court sure to rationalize the role of unlimited government, which will be tested starting next week. He made it worse and finally someone said so. The brilliance politically in that statement is that it begs the followup question which lewads to the unraveling of the administrations economic record.

'Lie' #2: [After he was a one term governor] he left the world of politics to go back into private business.

She points out that the he declared his candidacy for the presidency only 30 days later, not really leaving the world of politics. Interesting point with some validity, except that in terms of income, unlike Newt at Freddie Mac, Santorum as a lobbyist, and Obama as a public office holder and selling his public office fame at the bookstore, Romney was not on the public payroll in any way. He was supported by his private investments and really quite a long shot for President in 2008.

[Mass. healthcare] 'was only for our state, our circumstance'. Yes, it is a haven for liberals and they were going to have healthcare with or without Mitt Romney. But Obama could learn "a thing or two" from what we did in Massachusetts? - I can see a distinction there. She cannot? Learn a thing or two, like to do it state by state instead of against the US constitutions is a distinction. Not exactly on a par with the Commander in Chief understating in a public address on crucial economic policies the oil reserves of the United States of America by 20-fold!

[He promised to lower the deficit] but 'he doubled it'. - Clearly wrong but I see a couple of escape routes. Obvious to me that he was mis-speaking about doubling the debt not the deficit (as they all do). Obama was maintaining emergency levels of spending and expanding them for as far as the eye can see. His budgets projected out double the debt and already surpassed 8 years of Bush. If you take his full career in Washington instead of his Presidency, since taking the majority in congress and de facto leadership in the Senate he has more than doubled the deficit. The deficit was less than $300 billion when Dems including Obama took power and more than 4 times that in his Presidency, all accumulating with interest. Hardly a lie in underlying meaning even if the words were convoluted or wrong.

Maddow: 'We should take this seriously'...'Americans deserve better' ... this is "unprecedented deceit". - Oh really? The campaign season will bring out the deceit Romney will be running against, while yes, he better get his own factual act together. Besides the lies I have attributed to the President on matters crucial to our prosperity and survival, I recall the factual errors of Joe Biden in the VP debate as enough to turn any stomach and the free pass he got from the press on that as enough reason for anyone rational and informed to give up on politics.

There is nothing unprecedented about having to go back through any of these people's words and sort out the truth for yourself.

The late William F. Buckley Jr. naturally put it best when he said: "The wisest choice would be the one who would win. No sense running Mona Lisa in a beauty contest. I'd be for the most right, viable candidate who could win."

As the tough primary season ventures on, Romney has clarified and evolved his views into tough conservative positions.

On economic policy, for example, he would limit the government budget to 20 percent of gross domestic product, slash $500 billion in his first term and restrain Medicaid, food stamps and other entitlement transfers before block granting them to the states. His Medicare reform is nearly identical to the Wyden-Ryan approach. He's for a true all-of-the-above energy policy that would take the regulatory handcuffs off drilling on federal lands. He would repeal Obamacare. And he has come up with a supply-side tax cut that would lower marginal rates by 20 percent across the board and drop the corporate tax to 25 percent.

Those are very conservative positions. One could seriously ask whether Romney isn't the most conservative presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan.

Yes, there is still work to be done on clarifying the difference between Romneycare and Obamacare, as well as the need for a strong King Dollar approach to monetary policy. And more tax simplification. But in broad terms, it's impossible not to think of this former businessman as conservative on the key economic issues. He's for limited government, lower tax rates, and deregulation, all with a fair amount of detail.

Columnists Dan Henninger and Jennifer Rubin have written about Romney's close relationship with conservative icon Paul Ryan. It's a point I made a while back, as I speculated a Ryan appointment as Romney's budget director.

Sen. Jim DeMint, another conservative icon, recently told reporters after meeting with the former Massachusetts governor, "What I can tell conservatives from my perspective is that I'm not only comfortable with Romney, I'm excited about the possibility of him possibly becoming our nominee."

The second half of the week was dominated by Team Romney's Etch A Sketch gaffe. But folks shouldn't let this fog out Romney's brilliant speech about economic freedom at the beginning of the week.

On the night of his big Illinois victory, Romney offered a moral exposition of the merits of economic freedom and free enterprise business. And all the while, he mockingly referred to "professor Obama," who has no clue about what makes business tick.

Romney railed against overregulation, noting that Obama's regulators would have shut down the Wright brothers for their "dust pollution." He said the Obama government "would have banned Thomas Edison's light bulb," adding, "Oh, that's right. They just did."

Romney made clear that economic freedom is the key to the American economy. He said, "The history of the world has shown that economic freedom is the only force that has consistently lifted people out of poverty." He added: "The genius of America is that we nurture these dreams and the dreamers. We honor them, and yes, we reward them."

Pause a moment on the idea of rewarding the dreamers. This is a crucial difference with Obama, who wants to penalize the dreamers. Make a bunch of money and you're gonna pay higher tax rates. It's class warfare, the 1 percent vs. the 99 percent. Tax the rich. Redistribute.

But Obama's class warfare is an assault on freedom. It's an assault on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That's a key point in this election. It may be the key point. And by acknowledging the importance of rewarding success and constitutional freedom, Romney also shows he understands the incentive model of economic growth.

In fact, Romney recently told National Review's Robert Costa that solving the budget deficit could be done in two ways -- spending reductions and pro-growth tax policies.

The Ryan budget itself, when properly priced out in dynamic terms to account for growth incentives from lower tax rates, would be balanced in 10 years with substantially lower debt-to-GDP ratios. It sounds as if Romney gets this. That by itself is worthy of the nomination.

Then Romney told us Tuesday night: "This election will be about principle. Our economic freedom will be on the ballot." He said essentially the same thing the day before during a University of Chicago speech. And for many months, he has been talking about the battle for America's soul, between Obama's big-government entitlement state and his vision of a merit-based opportunity society.

This is Reagan-like. This is Jack Kemp-like. This is Paul Ryan's American idea.

Independent moderate friends tell me Republicans were unwise to pick this fight. Huh? We should not fight for the will of the people over the power of the union, just pay the price? The issue is national because nearly all states plus the Feds have the same problems.

The historical justification of the labor union is that the greedy capitalist too often had too much power to dictate employment in a community. In the case of all public employee unions which use to be illegal, the greedy capitalist is the will of the people. Public employee pay and benefits have to be high enough by definition to attract good workers. If compensation is too low, those jobs go unfilled until the pay increases to market levels. The market works and the citizens have a right to decide what to pay and what to spend. Why is it more complicated than that?

Fifty-four percent of Wisconsinites oppose the recall of Gov. Scott Walker, according to the most recent polling data from Rasmussen Reports.

In a phone survey of 500 likely voters, Rasmussen also said 52% at least somewhat approve of Walker’s job performance to date, while 46% at least somewhat disapprove. The findings include 40% who strongly approve and 40% who strongly disapprove.

The Louisiana primary on Saturday put the wooden stake through the presidential campaign of Newt Gingrich. He failed to take a state and he failed to get the 25% of the vote needed to score delegates statewide. Under Republican rules, a candidate must win at least five states or territories (or D.C.) in order to have his delegates count on the first ballot. Newt’s taken two. It’s time for him to pull the plug and release his delegates. His point has been made. He can write his book and hit the lecture circuit.

Meanwhile, Rick Santorum won but it is too little too late. His failure to attract backers and organize a national campaign continues to raise doubts about what sort of president he would be. He is trying to be the Reagan in the race by portraying Mitt Romney as the Jerry Ford.

The win in Louisiana was not as big as it appears to be. The rules in divvying up the state’s 46 delegates are so complex that Santorum may have a net gain of only 5 delegates, after being crushed in Puerto Rico last Sunday 23-0 and losing Illinois 42-10. From Politico:

Santorum picked up only 10 delegates from the victory, with five going to Romney and five remaining unbound after Saturday’s vote. The Louisiana GOP will divide up the remaining 23 delegates through a caucus process in late April.

One thing to bear in mind is Romney has received 4.1 million votes, Santorum 2.8 million so it is not as if Santorum is getting screwed so much as he still has not figured out the rules. He does well when the stakes are small, but poorly when the stakes are high.

But Santorum is doing well with conservative women. Guess what? Many women like having babies and do not like abortion.

President Obama has opened the first significant lead of the 2012 campaign in the nation's dozen top battleground states, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, boosted by a huge shift of women to his side.

In the fifth Swing States survey taken since last fall, Obama leads Republican front-runner Mitt Romney 51%-42% among registered voters just a month after the president had trailed him by two percentage points.

Mitt Romney has lost the 2012 election, and he's lost it because women are deserting the GOP over its opposition to ObamaCare's contraceptive coverage mandate. That's been the press drumbeat for the last few weeks. Now the argument appears to be backed up by a new USA Today/Gallup poll of swing-state voters. It shows Barack Obama out front for the first time since the poll started last November—largely because of the 2-1 advantage he enjoys over Mr. Romney among women under age 50.

Leave it to the liberal Salon website to sum up the conventional wisdom: "This is very likely a result of the prominence that contraception and women's issues have assumed in the public debate since February, when Republicans revolted against the Obama administration's efforts to make birth control a mandatory component of health insurance coverage."

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Mitt Romney on the campaign trail, April 1..One problem with this explanation: The same USA Today poll reports that 63% of those surveyed say they don't even know what Mitt Romney's position on government and birth control is. For that matter, 46% say they don't know President Obama's position either.

We don't know how these numbers break down among subgroups such as unmarried women, because USA Today has not released the cross tabs. What we do know, however, suggests it is premature to conclude the Republican Party's handling of the contraception mandate has cost Mr. Romney the women's vote. Especially when women in this same poll rank government policies on birth control last on their list of electoral priorities—behind health care, gas prices, unemployment, the national debt, etc.

We also know that many of the broadest conclusions about Mr. Romney's appeal among women from this new USA Today poll have been ripped out of any context. David Paul Kuhn is chief political correspondent for RealClearPolitics and author of "The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma." In an interview on Monday he told me the argument that Mr. Romney has lost women's support over the course of the contraception debate is contradicted by the timing.

"If the heated contraceptive debate was shifting the female vote, I would expect it to have burned Republicans with women back in February, when the debate was at its climax," Mr. Kuhn says. If you look at polls pre- and post-debate, Mr. Romney's support among women is steady in a half dozen major surveys, he adds.

Then there's the assumption that all women think the same. Steve Wagner of public opinion research firm QEV Analytics has taken a private poll, also of swing-state voters, specifically on the mandate, for the Catholic Association, a nonprofit. When he broke down the numbers for women under 50, he told me that he found two striking results.

The first is that nearly half of women under 50 attend religious services weekly. The second is that a majority oppose in principle what the administration is doing.

Related Video Columnist Bill McGurn on why Mitt Romney's support among women has tanked...When asked, for example, whether the federal government has the right to force morally objectionable coverage on religious institutions, 52% of these women say "No." An even larger percentage, 59%, say that insurance companies should handle contraceptives the way they do other drugs (instead of having to provide them free). All of which suggests that Republicans who advance a religious liberty argument when asked about the contraception mandate will find a receptive audience.

That's not to say that President Obama is wrong to look to women for new votes—especially single women. Notwithstanding the jokes about the "I Got a Crush on Obama" video that went viral during the last campaign, the Obama Girl apparently spoke for many. In 2008, Mr. Obama won women handily—and captured 70% of the single female vote.

That makes unmarried women one of the most solidly Democratic voting blocs. Given that an estimated 20 million unmarried women did not vote in the last presidential election, it also makes them a natural target for Democratic mobilization.

The question is whether free birth control will do it, especially when the USA Today poll shows it to be such a low priority. We forget today, but in the 2010 national elections women showed they cared plenty about issues such as ObamaCare and the stimulus when they went for Republicans 49% to 48%. With the economy now showing signs of getting better, that may be a harder sell in 2012, but it's a sale Mr. Romney has to make.

The good news for Mr. Romney is that his failure to elicit enthusiasm among women likely has little to do with the way he or his party have handled contraception.

The bad news for Mr. Romney is that his inability to generate much excitement among women appears related to a general inability to generate much excitement among anyone.

Printer-Friendly VersionThe conventional wisdom in Washington is even more demented than usual in its confident prediction of an Obama victory. The fact is that a careful analysis of the polling suggests that he faces the likelihood that his political base will underperform in the 2012 election, voting with their feet by staying home.

An enthusiasm gap is hurting Obama's candidacy and his reelection chances.

RealClearPolitics.com helpfully lists all of the test match-ups between Obama and Romney. Of the last 12 polls, going back to March 11, 10 tested their relative strength among registered voters. The average of these 10 polls gave Obama a 49-42 advantage, a comfortable margin of victory of 7 points. But the two polls during this period that tested likely voters -- one by Bloomberg on March 11 and one by Rasmussen on April 1 (but not an April Fools' joke) both showed a tied race. Bloomberg had it 45-45, while Rasmussen showed it deadlocked at 47 apiece.

All Democrats do better than Republicans when adults or registered voters are sampled, as opposed to likely voters. Those who tend not to vote are usually more downscale in income and education and more likely to vote Democratic. But the difference between registered voters and likely voters is rarely so large.

In the Clinton campaign of 1996, for example, the gap was rarely more than a few points.

The huge difference facing Obama based on whether the sample is of registered or likely voters -- a 7-point victory in one and a tied race in the other -- underscores the president's biggest problem: motivating his supporters to get out and vote.

Essentially, Obama's 2008 victory was based on a trio of high turnouts among African-Americans, Latinos and young people. While his ratings among blacks are still very high and he is likely to continue to get almost all of their votes, it is an open question whether he will be able to increase their turnout as dramatically as he did last time. In the election of 2008, blacks cast 14 percent of the vote, far above their usual 11 percent.

Among Hispanics, Obama is in serious trouble. While he won two-thirds of their votes in '08, Rasmussen now shows just 41 percent approving of his job as president. And among voters under 30, Obama is also unlikely to be able to replicate his '08 showing. Rasmussen has him drawing only 54 percent approval -- with only 22 percent strongly approving of his performance as president, far below the 67 percent vote share he drew among the young in '08.

Obama clearly recognizes his situation and is featuring policies meant to appease and energize his sagging base. From his intervention in the Florida shooting of an unarmed teenager to his new immigration policies and his focus on student loans, the president is trying to bridge the enthusiasm gap that threatens to doom his candidacy.

Conversely, the evidence suggests that white middle-aged and elderly voters are champing at the bit to vote to oust Obama from the Oval Office before he can inflict more damage on this country.

And all of these stats beg the fundamental question of where the undecided votes will go. A careful analysis of all the undecided votes in all the presidential elections since 1960 in which an incumbent was seeking a second term shows that 80 percent of those who were undecided in the final Gallup poll voted for the challenger even when he was losing the contest badly. While Goldwater, McGovern, Mondale, Dole and Kerry were badly defeated in their challenges to Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton and Bush, they all drew the vast bulk of the undecided vote. So when Obama gets 45 percent of the likely voters, the evidence would suggest that he is headed for a sizable defeat

If former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney defeats President Barack Obama on Nov. 6, his road to victory might lead all the way back to the speech he delivered Friday in Appleton, Wis.

In that address, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee presented his philosophy on the economy and its relationship with the federal government as a vision. And more importantly, he provided a moral underpinning for his viewpoint that attempted to connect his ideas to average Americans. Voters might reject Romney’s vision and opt for Obama’s. The president has been quite adept at framing his policies on taxes and government spending in terms of “balance” and “fairness” for the “middle class,” and polling data has shown that voters have reacted favorably.

But for perhaps the first time in a while, Republicans are attempting to equalize the playing field. Romney in the Friday speech went beyond the clinical talking points often employed by Republicans on Capitol Hill that raising taxes on the “rich” should be rejected because they depress job creation. The ex-governor and former venture capitalist offered a moral defense for smaller government and keeping taxes low on wealthy earners — and attempted to explain why doing so is good for everyone else.

Anyone else notice the Democratic party reframing all Republican themes and spinning it the other way around:

1) Republicans are calling Obama a radical : The crats are calling Repubs the radicals.

2) Obama calling the Court "activist".

3) Obama spinning the "socialist" label given to him by calling Repubs social "Darwinians".

4) Republicans calling for limited government switched to essentially no government.

To me the social Darwinian comment is by far the biggest tipoff. Basically he is saying that "free market", "competition", "capitalism", is "radical" and social government manipulation and regulation is mainstream.

Obama clearly has is backwards but until Romney can better enunciate hwo this is wrong and how this is exactly the opposite as to what made this country great the crats are very adept at bribing voters with taxpayer money.

*If* it is tru that female voters (surely mostly single mothers) are willing to throw the American ideals into the garbage heap of history for their little pet gov. programs than I guess the game is over.

I’ve no idea where President Obama gets his shirts and smokes, but he certainly talks like a highbrow, sufficiently so to persuade presidential historian Michael Beschloss to pronounce him the day after the 2008 election “the smartest president ever.” Yet, in the end, he plays Chicago style. You can take the community organizer out of Chicago, but you can’t take the Chicago out of the community organizer. Or as the Agence France-Presse headline put it, “Combative Obama Warns Supreme Court on Health Law.”

Headlines in which the executive “warns” the courts are usually the province of places like Balochistan, where powerful cabinet ministers are currently fuming at the chief justice’s determination to stop them kidnapping citizens and holding them for ransom — literally, that is, not merely figuratively, as in America. But, here as there, when Obama “warns” the Supreme Court “over health law,” it’s their health prospects he has in mind. He cautioned the justices — “an unelected group of people” — not to take the “unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”

The eunuchs of the palace media gleefully piled on: As the New York Times sees it, were the justices to take an “unprecedented” step so unprecedented there are two centuries’ worth of precedents going back to 1803, they would be fatally damaging “the Court’s legitimacy.”

All that’s unprecedented here is the spectacle of the president of the United States, while the judges are deliberating, idly swinging his tire iron and saying, “Nice little Supreme Court you got here. Shame if anything were to happen to it.”

A nation can have formal “checks and balances,” but in the end free societies depend on a certain deference to the proprieties. If you’re willing to disdain those, you can drive a coach and horses through accepted norms very easily. The bit about “a democratically elected Congress” was an especially exquisite touch given Obama’s recently professed respect for the democratic process: As he assured Vladimir Putin’s sock puppet the other day, he’ll have “more flexibility” to accommodate foreign interests after he’s got his “last election” and all that tedious democracy business out of the way. His “last election,” I hasten to add, not America’s.

Aside from his contempt for judicial review and those rube voters, what other checks and balances doesn’t he have time for? Well, he makes “recess appointments” when the Senate isn’t in recess, thus circumventing the dreary business of confirmation by that “democratically elected” legislature he likes so much. But hey, it’s only members of the National Labor Relations Board and the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, so why get hung up on constitutional niceties?

By the way, have you heard of this Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? No? Don’t worry, no big deal, it’s just a new federal agency. Because we can always use another of those, right? What’s one more acronym jostling in the ever-more-crowded alphabet soup of federal regulation? CFTC, CPSC, CNPP, and now CFPB. Not to be confused with CFPB-FM, the Inuit radio station just south of the Arctic Circle in the Nunavut village of Kugaaruk, where in 1975 the world’s all-time coldest wind chill was recorded: minus 135 degrees Fahrenheit.

Where was I? Oh, yes: the world’s all-time coldest wind chill. That’s what you’re going to be feeling at this point in an Obama second term. If you like his contempt for judicial review, parliamentary scrutiny, and representative democracy now, wait’ll you see how “flexible” he’ll get starting in January 2013. The CFPB appointment is not a small thing. Indeed, its new director, one Richard Cordray, embodies what’s gone so disastrously wrong with American government: You’ll have to be in compliance with him, but he doesn’t have to be in compliance with anybody, whether the Senate or the U.S. Constitution. As I say somewhere in my recent book, you don’t need a president-for-life if you’ve got a bureaucracy-for-life. More and more aspects of the citizen’s daily existence are regulated by rules and officials both of which are ever more disconnected from any meaningful accountability to the people’s representatives. As the president says, look for even more “flexibility” in a second term: more non-recess recess appointments, more executive orders, more bewildering innovations from the commissars of the hyper-regulatory state.

Which brings us to another aspect of government that Obama apparently finds a frightful bore: budgets. In free societies, the executive is subject to the creative tensions of popular restraint, legislative restraint, judicial restraint, and fiscal restraint. All these the president has artfully sidestepped. In the last three years, the United States has ceased to have any meaningful budgeting at the national level, with the consequence that Washington piles on roughly a trillion dollars of new debt every seven or eight months. This week, before the fawning toadies at the Associated Press luncheon, Obama attacked Congressman Paul Ryan’s plan to prevent America plunging into the debt abyss and at least keep its fingernails clawing at the clumps on the cliff edge for a couple more decades. Don’t believe him, sneered the president. “Hundreds of national parks” will close. Parts of the country will see “complete elimination of air-traffic control.” We will be unable to “combat violent crime.” Two million mothers and young children will wind up without “access to healthy food.” Anything else? You bet. The Ryan plan will doom everything everywhere — “the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food that we eat.”

“This is not conjecture,” said the president. “These are facts.”

Speaking of facts, in the last year the federal government has added the equivalent of the GDP of Canada in new debt. Who’s buying it? The Chinese? Not so much. They’ve got pretty much all the Washington IOUs they need. Sixty-one percent of debt issued by the Treasury is bought by the Federal Reserve — which is to say the left hand of the U.S. government is lending money to the right hand of the U.S. government. That’s one reason the dollar is in steep decline against every major currency. Indeed, had it not been for the French and Germans et al. inaugurating the new century by inventing a currency for an artificial jurisdiction with even less connection to economic reality (the European Union), it’s likely that the markets would have yanked the rug out from under the dollar by now.

Nonetheless, in a land where every mewling babe in the American nursery is born with a debt burden of just under $200,000, the president brags that only his party is “compassionate” to have no plan whatsoever even to attempt to do anything about this, no way, no how, not now, not ever.

Last week, the head of the General Services Administration, the federal agency that picks out the office furniture for the other federal agencies, had to resign after a bureaucrats’ junket to Vegas that included a lavish party with clowns and a $3,200 mind reader. The clowns seem surplus to requirements, but I’d love to know what that mind reader found. Obama-sized government ends nowhere good, and in his Chicago-style contempt for checks and balances he’s telling us that, if you enjoyed the first term, you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.

Barone is right on the mark IMO and I think Romney will win because the miserable status quo and the record and rhetoric of Obama will go up against a plan for optimism and growth whether you personally like Romney or not. Young people will either see the distinction in 2012 like they did in 1980 and lean Republican or they will sit out unenthused by what the excitement of 2008 brought them IMO. Too bad for Obama that the lasting theme was change and that 4 years comes up so quickly.-----------------April 9, 2012 Can Romney Show Voters That Obama Is Out of Date?By Michael Barone

Time for a postmortem on the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

Yes, I know Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich are still out there saying interesting things. And that Rick Santorum says it's only halftime and argues he can somehow overtake Mitt Romney by carrying his home state of Pennsylvania.

But polls there show a close race. And the idea that, if Romney falls short of a delegate majority, superdelegates will throng to a proudly unscripted, shoot-from-the-lip alternative is delusional.

The interesting questions are what the primaries and caucuses tell us about the state of the Republican Party and about Mitt Romney's chances in the general election.

In 2000, a time of apparent peace and prosperity, George W. Bush won the nomination by consolidating cultural conservatives and making inroads among the affluent. Cultural issues were then more important than economics or foreign policy.

This year, a time of economic stagnation and lingering war, Mitt Romney won the nomination by consolidating the affluent and making inroads among tea partiers. Economic issues far overshadow cultural issues.

Romney's victory margins have come from the suburbs in big metropolitan areas. Unlike Bush, he's been losing the rural and small-town counties. "Somewhat conservative" voters now personify the Republican Party.

All of which suggests that this fall Romney may run much better than recent Republican nominees in affluent Northern suburbs. They've voted increasingly Democratic over the past 20 years, turning target states into safely Democratic states. Now they may turn back again.

Additional evidence comes from the Pew Research surveys showing Democrats losing ground in the Obama years among white Catholics and Jews -- groups disproportionately concentrated in affluent Northern suburbs.

Affluent voters like articulate candidates and dislike impulsive ones. George W. Bush, despite his eloquent speeches, didn't come across as articulate. He seemed to enjoy his Texas twang and mangled sentences with happy abandon.

John McCain, more articulate, came across as impulsive, notably when he suspended his campaign amid the financial meltdown.

Through the primaries, Mitt Romney has come across as articulate if not exciting and methodical rather than impulsive.

In contrast, Barack Obama has started to flail. His know-nothing assault on the Supreme Court and his demagogic denunciation of "social Darwinism" (a phrase more common on campus than in real life) make him look like he's appealing to ignorant voters. Ditto his attacks on the rich.

Affluent voters don't like that. That's not what suburban supporters of Obama thought they were voting for in 2008.

They may not like Obama's refusal to engage the looming entitlements crisis, either. They don't admire people who act irresponsibly.

If Romney's strength among the affluent opens up a new opportunity for Republicans, his and his primary opponents' weakness among the young highlights a problem.

Under 30s were 18 percent of the electorate in 2008 and voted 66 to 32 percent for Obama.

Many are disenchanted with him now, but very few showed up in Republican contests. Only 6 to 12 percent of Republican primary voters were under 30. Leaving out Ron Paul voters, they were only 4 to 10 percent of Republican turnout.

Moreover, Romney carried under 30s only in Florida, Arizona, Massachusetts and Wisconsin.

He may owe that last result to the wholehearted endorsement of Wisconsin's Paul Ryan. The House Budget Committee chairman makes a powerful case that young people can't count on promised benefits unless entitlement programs are reformed.

There is a huge tension between the personalize-your-own-world ethos of the iPod/Facebook generation and the command-and-control, mid-20th-century welfare state programs of the Obama Democrats.

The young are stuck with disproportionate insurance premiums by Obamacare and with student loan debt that can't be discharged in bankruptcy. Some hope. Some change.

Romney needs to make the case that current policy -- what Obama has fallen back on -- is leading to a crash in which government will fail to keep its promises.

He needs to argue that his "opportunity society" means vibrant economic growth that can provide, in ways that can't be precisely predicted, opportunities in which young people can find work that draws on their special talents and interests.

Obama's policies, in contrast, treat individuals as just one cog in a very large machine, designed by supposed experts who don't seem to know what they're doing (see Obamacare, Solyndra). Their supposedly cutting-edge technology (electric cars, passenger rail) is more than a century old.

Romney, potentially strong with the affluent, needs to figure out how to get through to the young.